Photo: Car Advice
This may come as a surprise for quite a lot of fans of Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen and/or Fiat, but it seems that the three-pointed star people approached the aforementioned rivals a few years ago, before starting development of the highly-successful MFA (Modular Front Architecture) platform.
“When we were planning the current generation of front-wheel drive vehicles we were entertaining a number of discussions with BMW, with Fiat, with VW to check whether it makes sense to do something together,” Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche recently snickered from behind his majestic mustache to an analyst from Reuters.
At first glance, it wouldn't make any sense to talk with your rivals about developing a common car platform and then start competing with the resulting products against them, we said.
On second thought, BMW had a lot of experience in small front-wheel drive cars with the MINI, Volkswagen only has FWD-based platforms, while Fiat is known as an expert in small cars.
Despite this, it seems that Daimler AG decided against co-developing the MFA platform and went ahead on their own. A few years later, looking at the sales figures of every single model based on the architecture, we can pretty much say that it was a good idea, especially since the MFA will now be shared with other carmakers as well (Infiniti, ed).
At first glance, it wouldn't make any sense to talk with your rivals about developing a common car platform and then start competing with the resulting products against them, we said.
On second thought, BMW had a lot of experience in small front-wheel drive cars with the MINI, Volkswagen only has FWD-based platforms, while Fiat is known as an expert in small cars.
Despite this, it seems that Daimler AG decided against co-developing the MFA platform and went ahead on their own. A few years later, looking at the sales figures of every single model based on the architecture, we can pretty much say that it was a good idea, especially since the MFA will now be shared with other carmakers as well (Infiniti, ed).
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